Lecture: Hans Sedlmayr: The Anti-Classical Condition

On a photo taken in 1964 Hans Sedlmayr poses as king Louis XIV of France with a coke bottle. The snapshot reveals his personal cultural critical attitude in a unique way merging
together baroque nostalgia and modern consumer culture. Sedlmayr’s oeuvre is preliminary dedicated to an anti-classical canon, which again correlates with the anti-canon of the avant-garde.
Strictly rooted in the tradition of the Vienna school of art history, present phenomena structure the analysis of the past. Therefore, Sedlmayr observes the history of modernity obsessively. In a
long story of loss, it is baroque namely the work of the Austrian architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, which marks a moment of timelessness and perfection. From a postmodern and
poststructuralist point of view baroque works as role model for current culture – a thesis that should be applied experimentally onto Sedlmayr’s thoughts.